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Daily Archives: September 24, 2011

“All of life has been utterly, profoundly changed thanks to Facebook’s new feature”:http://realdanlyons.com/blog/2011/09/23/all-of-life-has-been-utterly-profoundly-changed-thanks-to-facebooks-new-changes-and-nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-and-all-i-can-do-is-sit-here-and-weep-at-the-beauty-and-magic-that-mark-zuckerber/ — well this is just awesome. Read it, and read it again.

I guess this resonates so much with me because I’ve been in the software industry now for 30 some years and man, the number of times I have seen something that “changes everything” — this happens at least several times a year. And more often than not, it doesn’t change everything. Some products are quite impactful — say the original Mac or the iPad, or Windows 95, or Visicalc, or many others — but they didn’t change everything, they aged and expired, and they all were heavily influenced by work ahead of them. Facebook is great and the new features look fine, but my life isn’t going to flip upside down. And I am deeply suspicious of handwavers telling me “This changes everything” — I usually find that they can’t really articulate what exact customer problem they are solving, and that the product probably doesn’t really change anything important.

Lyons’s skewering is more directly aimed at the trade press/bloggers. It is easy to write “Wow this changes everything” but I expect to see a little more depth and thought, I generally find sites like TechCrunch to be uninteresting — it is obvious they need to whack articles out fast. Lyons’ article had 100x the insight of any of the main press sites covering F8.

Following up on my last post about “my college football digital media setup”:http://theludwigs.com/2011/09/my-college-football-digital-media-setup/, I’ve been playing around with the WatchESPN app and it is not bad, if you are on a supported carrier you can watch reasonable quality video over a wifi connection. I use it at home to keep tabs on a second game while watching a primary game on the TV, but I can use it on any wifi connection anywhere, not just at home. Still waiting for the BTN2GO app that has been promised.

Some people have suggested sites like http://www.bahistv.tk/ for watching feeds. This is one of many sites that attempts to find you a live feed of various sports content. In desperation it might be useful, but the signals are generally standard def and laggy/lossy at that. So it is useful to me in the same way that Skype is useful — if you are making an overseas call, where costs are high and quality is iffy, then Skype is super useful. For domestic calls where the incremental cost of a call is $0 and quality is good, Skype is of little utility. So with these video sites — if I don’t have access the content on a domestic cable/satellite carrier, then it is useful. But will never be my preferred choice because the quality is so poor.